A word from NOVA

User Name

Remember Me?

Password

Latest Satellite NewsDiscussion, A word from NOVA at General Satellite News forum; DREAMBOX’ subscribers with nightmares of SWAT teams storming into their bedroom at 2am and putting the cuffs on them are ...

DREAMBOX’ subscribers with nightmares of SWAT teams storming into their bedroom at 2am and putting the cuffs on them are perhaps letting their imagination run wild. But don’t be shocked if a police officer knocks on your door with a search warrant in hand.

Is it illegal to own a ‘Dreambox?’ In short, yes.

According to Yiannakis Charalambous, commander at CID headquarters, both suppliers and users of ‘Dreambox’ are breaking copyright law. Violators who are found guilty are liable to a prison sentence of up to three years and/or a fine up to €40,000.

“We have the IP addresses of customers, and will be deciding on how to proceed from now on,” Charalambous told the Mail. He did not rule out house searches.

This weekend a third ‘Dreambox’ supplier was arrested in Larnaca, following two arrests in Limassol last week. The suppliers’ servers were immediately shut down and seized.

But in a legal reasoning, the Attorney-general has advised the police against prosecuting the thousands of users, because tracking down and then charging all the users out there poses a daunting challenge.

Instead, authorities will be going after the providers. The Mail understands also that police plan to arrest and charge perhaps a dozen individual users whom they will then use as witnesses against their suppliers.

With the suppliers being chased out of Dodge, police hope it will knock some sense into clients.

“People who have paid €250 for installation and €300 in yearly fees will suddenly find themselves without a signal. And guess what? There are no refunds,” said Charalambous.

Suppliers initially purchase a television package legally, but then use servers [powerful computers] to beam the signal out to customers via a broadband Internet line, without permission from the companies.

Dreambox holders can buy a package for as little as €17 per month and have even more channel options than those on offer by the two main legitimate providers; LTV and Multichoice (Nova Cyprus).

Roughly speaking, the content available on a ‘Dreambox’ would cost anywhere from €80 to €100 to get legally, and would require subscribing to at least two legitimate providers.

“In my view, users are aiding and abetting the committal of a criminal offence, which in this case is intellectual property right infringement,” said lawyer Achilleas Demetriades.

“This is because every month they knowingly pay a subscription to a third party to gain access to an encrypted signal. Furthermore, subscribers to illegal packages should know that in addition to criminal liability, there is also civil liability for loss of revenue to the legitimate providers.”

And Demetriades said that users of pirated television content cannot feign ignorance:

“It’s not like you’re buying a bootleg CD, which you may or may not be aware whether it’s an original copy. If you’re paying a fee that’s lower than the legitimate package, then you can’t pretend you don’t know it’s against the law.

“It’s piracy, plain and simple,” he told the Mail.

Moreover, this sort of activity infringes at least two more laws: the European Convention on the Legal Protection of Services based on, or consisting of, Conditional Access; and the Convention on Cybercrime, which refers to crime committed through the Internet. Cyprus has ratified both the above treaties.

“We certainly welcome the enforcement of the law by the police,” said Demetriades, who is acting on behalf of Multichoice, one of the major providers of digital satellite in Cyprus.

Legitimate companies say they are losing hundreds of thousands of euros each year because of pirated television content.

Demetriades would not be drawn on whether Multichoice would be suing individual users of the ‘Dreambox’. He did not rule out the possibility, however.

With the pirates on the run, the police crackdown seems to be working. The word on the street is that some of the major suppliers have moved their equipment to the north of the island, where presumably they would be immune from prosecution. Others, the Mail has heard, have been frantically moving their servers to different premises in Nicosia and Larnaca, changing their IP addresses in a desperate bid to evade the radar of law enforcement. And some have chosen to ‘lay low’ by switching off their signal for a few days until things cool down.

With the Champions League matches coming up today and tomorrow, there’s no telling how many folks with a ‘Dreambox’ will be left staring at a blank screen in horror.

A standard ‘Dreambox’ package is based on the Nova Greece satellite platform, which broadcasts live the vast majority of Champions League games. The Greek company recently secured the broadcast rights to the competition for the next three years. The Nova Greece package, however, is not legally available to viewers in Cyprus.

By contrast, Nova Cyprus, the legal platform, will not be carrying any Champions League football, because the exclusive rights for 2009-2012 have gone to CyTAVision.

( enforcing this law is the problem , but it seems greece has no respect for euro laws,(or found a loophole in exisiting laws) tracing , protocolling internet traffic is against eurolaws unless the authorities have reason to believe the person being watched is a terrorist --> for monatary proposes there is no support yet in parlament ...but im sure the lobbyist´s--> will soon be following suit...from gr...